Yet I won’t let you fancy me of such an irrational state of simplicity as not to be fully aware that you, with your ’nature of the fields and forests,’ look down disdainfully and with an inward heat of glorying, upon me who have all my pastime in books—­dead and seethed.  Perhaps, if it were a little warmer, I might even grant that you are right in your pride.  As it is, I grumble feebly to myself something about the definition of nature, and how we in the town (which ‘God made’ just as He made your hedges) have our share of nature too; and then I have secret thoughts of the state of the thermometer, and wonder how people can breathe out of doors.  In the meantime, Flush, who is a better philosopher, pushes deep into my furs, and goes to sleep.  Perhaps I should fear the omen for my correspondent.

Oh yes!  That picture in ‘Boz’ is beautiful.  For my own part, and by a natural womanly contradiction, I have never cared so much in my life for flowers as since being shut out from gardens—­unless, indeed, in the happy days of old when I had a garden of my own, and cut it out into a great Hector of Troy, in relievo, with a high heroic box nose and shoeties of columbine.[72] But that was long ago.  Now I count the buds of my primrose with a new kind of interest, and you never saw such a primrose!  I begin to believe in Ovid, and look for a metamorphosis.  The leaves are turning white and springing up as high as corn.  Want of air, and of sun, I suppose.  I should be loth to think it—­want of friendship to me!

Do you know that the royal Boz lives close to us, three doors from Mr. Kenyon in Harley Place?  The new numbers appear to me admirable, and full of life and blood—­whatever we may say to the thick rouging and extravagance of gesture.  There is a beauty, a tenderness, too, in the organ scene, which is worthy of the gilliflowers.  But my admiration for ‘Boz’ fell from its ‘sticking place,’ I confess, a good furlong, when I read Victor Hugo; and my creed is, that, not in his tenderness, which is as much his own as his humour, but in his serious powerful Jew-trial scenes, he has followed Hugo closely, and never scarcely looked away from ‘Les Trois Jours d’un Condamne.’

If you should not be on the road, I hope you won’t be very long before you are, and that dearest Mrs. Martin will put off building her greenhouse—­you see I believe she will build it—­until she gets home again.

How kind of you and of her to have poor old Mrs. Barker at Colwall!

Do believe me, both of you, with love from all of us,

Very affectionately yours,
BA.

[Footnote 72:  See ‘Hector in the Garden’ (Poetical Works, iii. 37).]

To H.S.  Boyd February 21, 1843.